Rushdie's Verses: Good vs. Evil Misundertood (standard:non fiction, 2257 words)
Author: Bobby Zaman	Added: Nov 07 2002	Views/Reads: 12222/2841	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
An essay on Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, distanced from the "Anti-Islamic" rhetoric and accusations of "blasphemy" with which the novel has been charged.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

scenario. 

TSV is hardly much removed as a satire from Vonnegut’s cradle.  From the
time that the Bostan explodes in midair, courtesy of the bombs pasted 
to the body of its hijackers, hurling into the heaves Farishta and 
Chamcha, the duo tumble down the heavens toward Earth, which will 
become a hell of sorts from the time they land on its soil.  In a twist 
of fate, complemented by an arrest in the middle of the night ­ 
invoking images of the world of Kafka’s Joseph K. ­ Chamcha is carted 
off by English authorities for violating immigration laws, and Farishta 
embarks on a romp of sex, drugs, booze, and semi-success as an actor 
through the nook and cranny of Margaret Thatcher’s London.  While 
Farishta walks off, taking with him the life due to Chamcha, the latter 
begins a transformation, a physical metamorphosis from man to a 
cloven-hoofed, horned goat.  Farishta’s evil is his robbery of another 
man’s fate, and Chamcha’s manifestation springs from within, turning 
his exterior into an image with which we are accustomed to identify the 
Fallen Angel. 

Chamcha is saved from the treachery of the authorities and given a roof
over his head at the Shaandar Café, owned and operated by Mohammed 
Sufyan, his cantankerous wife, and budding couplet of girls Mishal and 
Anahita.  The sisters are immediately drawn to the mystique of 
Chamcha’s half-man, half-goat appearance, and Chamcha, while struggling 
with confusion and severed ties with his father in Bombay, makes a 
silent oath to avenge his misfortune. 

This is what ignited fires across the Muslim world: Gibreel Farishta has
a dream.  In that dream comes to him the land of Jahilia (Mecca) where 
a businessman named Mahound abandons the life of entrepreneurial 
endeavors and becomes a prophetic soul.  Mahound is a derogatory form 
of Mohammed and Mohammed, in the Quran, is the messenger of god and the 
founder of Islam. Thus, Rushdie’s opus was catapulted at once to the 
status of Joyce’s Ulysses and Public Enemy number one.  The burners of 
the copies of TSV and effigies of its author were seldom to never, made 
up of individuals that actually read the book.  Western media scooped 
this up as a paramount opportunity to criticize the existence of 
freedom of any sort in the “Third World,” and a story about the 
standoff between good and evil was buried alive under a rubble of 
political rhetoric. 

Over the years critics and scholars have deconstructed Rushdie and TSV
and presented myriad explanations as to the nature in which it 
allegedly made a mockery of Islam, with that being its direct and sole 
purpose.  Fine.  All of that makes for invigorating research, 
theological ventures, and a lot of unnecessary gassing about Fabian 
this and British elitist that.  The more TSV was the subject, the less 
it was mentioned in such treatises. 

Good reading aside, they came about as close to proving anything as did
T.S. Eliot in his essay Hamlet where he ventured to argue that Hamlet 
fails as a play because Shakespeare delved too much into Hamlet the 
character’s psyche, thereby letting the play as a whole fall into 
disparity.  Eliot, in his quest to be the quintessential “English” 
critic, travels through a maze of what become sparks rather than 
blazing commentaries on the play, and on English literature.  The essay 
is geared, as he makes clear in the opening, to “We in English 
literature,” keeping its parameters inclusive of a handful of his elite 
group, with a few exceptions of actual writers.  In the end it emits 
nothing more than his strong abilities to manipulate language, sound 
like the stiff upper echelon of British literary society (which I’m 
guessing was a purpose,) and fail as a piece of literary criticism.   
He has an acceptable argument, worthy enough fodder for thought, but 
outside of a series of excerpts, which demonstrate a valiant effort and 
Eliot’s decent understanding of the play, it treads the outskirts of 
the original argument and ends, or rather trails off, without a 
satisfactory conclusion. 

Canadian author, filmmaker, and critic Julian Samuel wrote a searing
essay that not only drove a lawnmower over TSV, but also cut Rushdie 
down to the ranks of “an occasionally stimulating writer.”  His essay 
Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is replete with angry references to the 
lack of substance in the works of Rushdie, and accuses him of catering 
to Cambridge nurtured minds and the weakness of the west to 
sensationalize any follies and slips committed by the east.  Samuel 
repeatedly takes the easy way out in his attack on what he believes was 
Rushdie’s “motives” for the subject matter of TSV.  He is convincing to 
a certain extent because the essay makes it sound like Samuel knows 
what he’s talking about.  He points the finger at Rushdie and claims 
that the author knew the sensationalist potential of his book and 
therefore targeted the western world’s hype/sympathy to achieve the end 
that ensued.  Samuel sees TSV as nothing more than a publicity stunt 
and some form of a political machine, down to claiming that Iran used 
the fatwa on Rushdie to divert attention from the dust brewed by it’s 
war with Iraq.  He writes, “The fundamentalist government of Iran used 
the book to deflect criticism from itself; with the end of the 
Iraq-Iran war, the potential for internal dissent and a second 
revolution must have been an awful strain on this grey clerical regime. 
Hence the more than incidental political value to the ayatollahs of 
their renewal of the universal death-sentence on Rushdie.” This could 
have been a plausible assertion if the Iranian government was in a 
search to grab anything that would make the west (America) sympathize 
with its Islam-centered declaration for Rushdie’s death.  It produced 
the opposite.  Rushdie, more than ever, became an icon of literature, a 
symbol and forerunner against censorship, and the first person to be 
bestowed honorary tenure as professor (not a title that exists) at MIT. 
 It further aggrandized the west’s assertions on the narrow-minded, 
holy-warring image fundamentalist Iranian Muslims continue to portray 
of Islam.  To stretch a parallel a little further, good vs. evil is 
happening right there in the “persons” of America and Iran. 

I’m wary of accepting Samuel’s discourse on TSV because to date I have
only seen his criticism published in journals like IndiaStar Review of 
Books, (a journal glaringly critical and condescending to anything 
Rushdie) and Arab World Review, and his numerous films and literary 
ventures revolve densely around Arab related subject matters.  This 
particular essay on TSV was designed for a series of debates that 
originated at Ramjas College, University of New Delhi.  Rushdie was 
banned from entering Indian soil for more than a decade, so no doubts 
remain as to the rows of ears lent Samuel for his remarks. 

Samuel, a prolific writer and scholar, also skimmed right across the
good vs. evil paradigm and succumbed to the rollick of literary 
references and disclaiming footnotes.  In Salman Rushdie’s Satanic 
Verses, Samuel only succeeds in inadvertently disclosing his 
understanding of “the Fabian soft folds of British literary society,” 
(which he accuses Rushdie of exploiting,) regurgitating previous digs 
he has made on Canadian perceptions of the east, and turning a 
glorified book review into a dissertation on post-colonial literature.  
Evil is not difficult to find in TSV.  It’s in every page, embodied in 
people, reality, and fantasy.  Good is the accepted, obvious opposite 
of evil.  For those seeking closure after being taken through an orgy 
of upturned lives, there is finality: Saladin Chamcha, who regains his 
human form returns to Bombay to find his father slowly surrendering to 
the ravage of cancer, and is presented with the opportunity to serve 
him in his last days.  Chamcha senior is a bag of bones and drooping 
skin.  Saladin attends on him in every way, from feeding and shaving 
him, to carrying him from bed to bath and vice versa.  It leaves the 
impression of good’s triumph sans being preachy or falling into 
platitudes. 

The hurly-burly seems to be done, and the battles ­ whatever they may
have been ­ have been lost and won.  Salman Rushdie is forever branded 
as that writer who wrote that book that got him in trouble.  If this is 
the only way by which TSV is remembered, one can only wonder how long 
the names of banned books will be summoned by their respective titles 
and not by the position in which it put its author; one can only wonder 
how important it really is to have plot, theme, and characters if all 
that’s needed to make or break the book is a reference subtle or direct 
to another work, after all, literary criticism lives off the blood of 
authors and poets.  The Satanic Versus is the effort of a writer, his 
take, on a subject, which in its most basic form never fails to 
enthrall the imagination: good vs. evil. 


Tweet